The Translation Of The Headlines Of English Soft News Into Chinese On The Basis Of Reiss's Translation Criticism

In her most influencing book Translation Criticism: The Potentials and Limitations — Categories and Criteria for Translation Quality Assessment, Reiss discusses a central topic of translation studies: how to establish reliable criteria to systematically assess the quality of translation. The theory of text typology in this book sets up an important criterion for translation practice and translation criticism: text type determines translation strategy. Based on Karl Buhler's functions of language, Reiss puts forward four text types: the content-focused text, the form-focused text, the appeal-focused text and the audio-medial text. Reiss believes that different kinds of texts call for different translation strategies and criteria.Soft news belongs to the content-focused text with some incomplete appellative function. The content-focused texts require invariance in transfer of the contents and the linguistic form of the translation versions should be adapted without reservation to the idiom of the target language. The incomplete appellative function of soft news also demands that the form of the translation versions be essentially oriented to the usage of target language. The translation of the headlines is crucial for the translation of the whole soft news. At present, some scholars have begun the study of that field and give some valuable insights on the translation process and translation techniques of headlines. According to Reiss's theory of text typology, the author of this thesis considers that the headlines of soft news are also the content-focused text. Translators can employ the free translation method in the light of the contents of the body of the soft news. If necessary, the translation techniques of amplification or adaptation can be adopted to convey the message accurately to the readers.Besides the introduction and the conclusion, the present thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter 1 introduces several important viewpoints of Reiss's translation criticism: the theory of text typology, the linguistic elements and the extra-linguistic elements in determining or evaluating a translation, and her functional theory of translation.